Ralph Ortega, a 45-year-old man from Moreno Valley, was still alive when deputies were sent to the 24000 block of Dracaea Avenue at about 8:57 p.m. on November 1, 2024, after a report of an assault with a deadly weapon. When they arrived, they found him suffering from gunshot wounds. He was rushed to a hospital, but he did not survive. In the first hours after his death, the case was treated as a homicide, and investigators released almost nothing about who had pulled the trigger or why,
leaving only the hard outline of a violent night in a neighborhood suddenly marked by blood and sirens.
For months, the killing seemed to hang in that uncertain space that so many homicide cases enter after the scene is cleared. Early reports said there was no suspect information immediately available, and investigators publicly asked for help from anyone who knew what had happened. The silence around motive only deepened the sense of an unfinished story: a man shot multiple times, a neighborhood left to replay the sound of gunfire, and detectives from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Central Homicide Unit trying to piece together what had led to Ortega’s final moments.
The break came roughly seven months later. By late May 2025, investigators said they had spent months gathering evidence and had identified two Moreno Valley men as suspects: Adam Melvin Carl, 29, and Ruben Alexander Puentes, 28. Authorities said both men were arrested on May 30, 2025, with assistance from the sheriff’s Emergency Services Team and Major Crimes Unit. According to the sheriff’s account and subsequent court reporting, the investigation had led detectives back to a confrontation on Dracaea Avenue, where Ortega and the defendants were allegedly involved in an unspecified dispute before the shooting erupted.
Prosecutors then began drawing the case into sharper legal focus. Court reporting said Carl was charged with first-degree murder, being a felon with a firearm, and sentence-enhancing allegations involving a gun and great bodily injury. Puentes was charged with assault with a firearm resulting in great bodily injury, along with an allegation that he used a deadly weapon in the commission of a felony. Authorities alleged that during the confrontation, Carl pulled a pistol and fired multiple times at Ortega, and that both defendants fled immediately afterward. At the time of their initial court appearance, Carl was being held on $1 million bail and Puentes on $50,000 bail.
The case did not end with the arrests. On June 12, 2025, both Carl and Puentes pleaded not guilty, meaning the prosecution’s version of that night remained an accusation rather than a proven conclusion. Public reporting available through the sources reviewed does not show a trial verdict or conviction after those pleas, so the case appears to have remained pending at that stage. What is clear from the reporting is that Ortega’s death moved from a nearly silent homicide scene to a two-defendant prosecution built around an alleged dispute, a burst of gunfire, and an investigation that took months to bring names and charges into public view.
